Most SaaS founders struggle with the same problem:
How do you get affiliates to discover your program when you're just starting out?
You can:
- Tweet about it ☁️
- Email your users 📧
- Ask around in communities 🙋♂️
…but none of these scale reliably.
🧠 Rethinking Affiliate Growth
I started wondering:
What if affiliate programs could promote each other — automatically?
No outreach.
No cold DMs.
No separate dashboards.
Just:
✅ Embedded referral dashboards
↔️ Affiliate traffic shared between products
⚖️ Credits to keep the exchange fair
⚙️ The system I built
I created a Referral Exchange, built into Refgrow — my native affiliate platform for SaaS.
Here’s how it works:
- You opt-in from your dashboard
- Your program appears inside other SaaS dashboards (and in the public directory)
- If someone clicks your program and joins → you lose 1 credit
- If someone joins another program via your dashboard → you earn 1 credit
Credits are the currency of attention.
You can buy more if you need a boost.
Or earn them by helping others grow.
🛠️ Technical bits
- Click attribution works using referral codes + query params
- Signup detection is tracked via the same webhook/event system used for affiliate conversions
- Credits are handled per-project and logged in a dedicated table
- Program listings are auto-filled by scraping homepage metadata + feeding it to GPT-4o for summary (title, logo, description)
🧪 Key lessons
- SaaS founders prefer tools that feel like infra, not marketing hacks
- Embedded discovery converts better than sending people to another platform
- Credit-based mechanics keep the system balanced and spam-resistant
- Auto-generated listings remove friction and increase adoption
💬 What do you think?
If you're building something affiliate-related — or trying to kickstart growth for your SaaS — I’d love to hear how you handle discovery.
Drop a comment, or check out how it works live:
Thanks for reading!
